Retail shopping remains a billion-dollar business that involves a vast array of distinct distribution channels. Product purchases by consumers are made at traditional brick-and-mortar stores such as Macy's and on-line retailers such as Buy.com. While the shopping experience can be vastly different, there are common elements to the process. Goods are inspected, reviewed and selected for purchase. Prior to a customer's taking possession of a selected item, the purchase process must be completed, typically through the collection of payment for the selected item.
In a traditional store, the selected items are taken to a check-out, where a cash register is used to tabulate and collect the price of the goods, and to make change. To the extent that credit or debit cards are used for payment, the store includes network connections to various banks and related credit authorities to complete the requested transaction in near-instantaneous fashion. A substantial engineering effort has been made to make the final purchase process as seamless as possible, so as to complete the transaction in a minimal window of time.
A similar shopping experience has been created for web-based retailing. In particular, online merchants seek to replicate in part the experience shoppers have in a traditional retail environment, and further, to enhance the ability of consumers to browse goods so that the decision to purchase is enjoyable and the actual purchase and settlement is seamless and quick. To this end, various online tools such as “shopping carts” are used to simulate a traditional retail shopping experience, to collect goods for purchase and to complete the purchase at a separate checkout location (or checkout web page). Of course, online purchases are reliant on electronic commerce payment systems such as PayPal, and various credit/debit facilities, since cash or other currency types (e.g., checks) create additional issues for online transactions. In addition, online systems are subject to fraud and privacy concerns that don't typically concern traditional retail outlets. Moreover, there have been efforts to develop that facilitate the online purchase process, including local storage of redundant data. See, e.g., U.S. Publication No. 2010/0241518, herein incorporated by reference.
In addition to traditional and online shopping based on the above, there has been a growing use of reward points to effect select consumer behavior. Reward currencies stem from the earliest days of mass commerce, including the use of trading stamps more than 100 years ago to increase sales at gas stations and grocery stores (Sperry and Hutchinson at one point printed more “green” stamps than the US Postal System). Airlines and travel companies now routinely include some form of rewards currency, and many banks and credit cards have followed suit. As commerce has moved online, so have the various reward currency programs, with early versions distributed by “Netcentives” and similar outlets. The expanded use of reward currencies has increased geometrically the number of “points” held by consumers, swelling this purchasing currency so that it now reflects a meaningful potential driver of consumer sales.
These loyalty programs, however, limit consumers to redeeming their points at certain locations (and/or for certain items), such as the specific loyalty program's redemption store (or a limited collection of stores). Thus, if a loyalty program's redemption store does not carry an item the consumer wants, the consumer may be forced to spend her loyalty points on an item she does not want. Moreover, the customer may be dissatisfied enough to simply forgo using her points, as evidenced by the billions of dollars worth of points accumulated in the online marketplace that went unused and were allowed to expire in 2011. In addition, consumers do not currently have an effective means for utilizing their points offline, in a traditional store.
There are several emerging technologies that are now changing the landscape of traditional point of sale commerce. Over the last decade, there has been a growing adoption by merchants of “tap” to buy systems that allow a credit/debit card holder to skip the card swipe and complete the transaction with a simple tap. More recently, smartphones and tablets are now equipped with near field technologies that allow communications between the phone/tablet and various point of sale detector/computer systems. Examples of this new platform are many and diverse such as that found in US Publication No. 20120238207, herein incorporated by reference. This capability has greatly increased the sophistication of point of sale communication capabilities including tracking and the like. There, however, has not been a meaningful solution to simplify and facilitate reward/promotion based transactions.
There exists a need for an effective system of allowing points to be redeemed for any purchase, online and offline—including purchases outside of a specific loyalty redemption store.